[Diana Collins]

The Parlex cable can be the source of both "boot loops" and complete start-up failure. I had one Series 1 DirecTiVo simply shut off one day - no front panel lights, no drive spinup, nothing. Turned out to be the Parlex cable. I've retired all of my series 1s to the attic, but I used to keep a spare Parlex cable on hand for emergencies. Order a new cable from Weaknees.

BTW: If you didn't replace the Linux kernel on your TiVo boot drive, you are only using 137GB of each of the 160GB drives. To get the full 160GB, you'll need to use copykern to update to a LBA48 Linux kernel, and you'd need to redo the upgrade from scratch. If the extra 23GB per drives is not important to you, you can leave it as is.

 

[Diana Collins]

Not updating the kernel will start showing its ugly face as soon as your drive gets about half full with all sorts of problems - bad recordings or no recordings or ?. This is not an option. I learned the hard way after upgrading and reselling four series ones without using copykern. They all ended up coming back, some after quite a while.

NOT TRUE!! Unless he used a LBA48 boot CD to run mfstools, his MFS partitions don't know anything about the disk space beyond 137GB. Before there were LBA48 kernels readily available LOTS of people upgraded with 160GB, using only the first 137GB.

 

[Diana Collins]

Okay, now I am losing faith...

After some research here (albeit limited), I can't seem to figure out what I can do to go

• From: Dual Drive, 40 and 80
• To: Dual Drive, 160 x 2

It looks like I need to use a Boot CD (that has biteswapping, support for disks larger than 137 GB, and copykern on it), but I'm not sure how to do it, physically. With the boot floppy, I was able to plug all four drives in (two old, two new) and just fire away. With a Boot CD, I'm down one IDE port.

Is it done in two steps?
1) Upgrade to one 160 disk,
2) Expand to 2?

From Hindsdale, in going from two drives to one larger one:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc

But this shows -s 127, which I'm beginning to understand needs to be more reflective of larger partitions.

Or should I just assume that if I buy one of those newer BootCD's that comes with copykern that it'll have instructions for what I need to do?

Oh, and then there's this scary statement:

Using large disks with TiVo

Don't worry, be happy!

You have a series 1, so you WERE able to simply upgrade a second time using mfstools (which does the byteswapping automatically). Series 2 TiVos have two more partitions than do Series 1s, so they can only be expanded once. Besides, if you had a byteswap problem, your TiVo would never have booted.

If you did the upgrade to the 2 160GB drives using the standard (i.e. NOT LBA48 aware) mfstools boot CD, then you are fine. Once your Parlex cable is fixed you'll have two 137GB drives.

IF you want to go back and start over, and use copykern to update the kernel, you can get an additional 45 hours or so of storage. If that's what you want to do, it will be difficult staring with 2 drives. You'd need to a "A and B to one new larger A drive" upgrade from your 80 and 40 (120GB total) to one of the 160GB drives, then add the second 160GB drive as a new drive B. Doing that, while preserving recordings, would take a long time.

Don't worry about the "future update" issue - The Series 1 TiVos will never get another update.

 

[Diana Collins]

High 50's to 60 is WAY too hot. The usual maximum recommended operating temperature for a hard drive is 50°C to 55°C. Since your Philips DirecTiVo is black, I'm assuming it is a DSR-6000. These were VERY badly designed for cooling. Basically, they push hot air out the bottom right of the unit, where it flows under the unit and back in the bottom left.

Check out these instructions to improve cooling: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=109426